Tuesday, October 16, 2012

State sponsor of peace talks (II)

The peace talks between Colombia’s government and the FARC guerrillas will
start in Oslo this week after 31 FARC members, with capture orders against them
lifted by the government, flew from Colombia to Havana last weekend, then on to
Norway (La Republica).The FARC was founded 48 years ago and
Colombia’s is the longest-running guerrilla war in the Americas.

A press conference is scheduled Wednesday.The Oslo meetings are to finalize the agenda
and ground rules, and negotiations will begin formally next month in Havana (El
Colombiano).There have been
contacts between the Colombian government and the ELN guerrillas geared toward
getting that group to join peace negotiations too.

Colombian President
Juan Manuel Santos has declared that he will not enter a cease fire, will not
grant a territorial safe haven to the guerrillas, expects the talks to take “months,
not years,” and will end the talks if they appear to be going nowhere. Last
month, Santos thanked the Cuban and Norwegian governments for their support in
this process, saying: “Without their presence it would not have been possible
to come to this point.”Cuba and Norway
will serve as “hosts and guarantors” in the talks, he said, while Venezuela and
Chile will be “companions.”

The FARC has adopted a
defiant public tone (see this BBC interview
with a timeline of the conflict), although FARC negotiator Marco León Calarcá spoke more seriously in a
two-part interview with La Jornada (here and here).Calarcá said the FARC position is “realistic,” seeking
“possibilities to live and in that context to engage in politics, to be in
opposition without this implying necessarily being a military target.”

In other words, the key for the
FARC is to be able to stop fighting and to engage safely in opposition
politics.That implies negotiating a
ceasefire, integration of FARC fighters into civilian life, and whatever
political and security guarantees are needed to give both parties confidence
that the negotiated arrangements will work.

Success or failure will belong to
the Colombians, but Cuba has a key role and has taken on a serious and
interesting challenge.The fact that
Havana enjoys the confidence of a very
old, faltering Marxist insurgency and a center-right, free-market democracy that
is close to Washington is a big vote of confidence in Cuban diplomacy
and a sign of its prominence in the hemisphere, even in the post-Fidel era.One
can imagine that Cuba’s key contribution could come when the FARC reaches
crunch time and has to decide whether to take the leap into civilian life and
politics – which it will surely call a transition to another form of struggle.

U.S. interests are in play –
humanitarian, security, anti-drugs, and anti-terrorism interests in a country
where our taxpayers have spent $3.5
billion in aid since 2008.

The U.S. government designates
the FARC as a “foreign terrorist organization” whose “tactics include
bombings, murder, mortar attacks, kidnapping, extortion, and hijacking, as well
as guerrilla and conventional military action against Colombian political,
military, and economic targets,” with ties to drug traffickers, and whose
operations occur both in Colombia and in “neighboring countries.”

An end to the conflict and the dismantlement of
the FARC military capacity would result in the removal of that terrorist
designation from the FARC or its successor political organization.Such an achievement would add one more
absurdity to Washington’s continued designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of
terrorism.”